Sunday 23 Dec 2012

Author and historian Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, discusses the Vatican's law of celibacy for Roman Catholic priests. She talks about the history of this law and the problems confronting celibate priests.

Sunday 16 Dec 2012

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War hold an international meeting every second year. Dr Peter Underwood, a physician from Perth, attended their last conference, which took place in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. He talks about his experiences and impressions during his stay in this city, which suffered the blast of an atomic bomb 67 years ago.

Sunday 9 Dec 2012

Dr Rob Morrison, a Professorial Fellow from Flinders University in Adelaide, is also the Vice President of Friends of Science in Medicine, an organisation that was formed to discourage universities from offering pseudoscientific health courses under a scientific banner and calling them evidence-based when they are not. The Australian Skeptics have named the Friends of Science in Medicine as 'Skeptic of the Year'. This year's winner of the Australian Skeptics' Bent Spoon award 'for the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudoscientific piffle' went to Fran Sheffield from Homeopathy Plus. This organisation has made claims that homeopathy can help with the highly contagious bacterial disease of whooping cough and that vaccine is ineffective against a new strain of that disease.

Sunday 25 Nov 2012

Associate Professor Claire Bowern is in the Department of Linguistics at Yale University. Today she talks about why some languages become endangered and why we should care about this. Her main area of work are endangered Australian Aboriginal languages.

Sunday 18 Nov 2012

Dr Ron Sandland retired from CSIRO in 2007 as Deputy Chief Executive. He was responsible for the National Flagship Initiative and the Science Investment Process and prior to that he was Chief of CSIRO's Mathematical and Information Sciences Division. Today he talks about why CSIRO, Australia's largest publicly funded research organisation, staked everything on an ambitious program of renewal and what happened when it did.

Sunday 4 Nov 2012

Perth based journalist and author Victoria Laurie talks about the flora and fauna of Western Australia's southwest region, a 'biodiversity hotspot' where large numbers of species are concentrated, but that place is under threat.

Sunday 28 Oct 2012

Jonathon Porritt is the Founder Director of Forum for the Future in London. In this talk he celebrates the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, which took a hard look at the effects of pesticides on our environment and was instrumental in the banning of DDT.